Precision Grill Teams

In a cloud of apple-wood smoke, the air swirling with the smells of top-secret spice mixtures, Donna McClure was running out of time and patience. Finally, she pointed a spray bottle at her minions and leapt the line between urgent request and angry order.

“I need a rib,” she snarled. “Get me a rib -- now!”

“Runners” were already hustling the barbecued pork ribs of her competitors to the judges. One of McClure’s teammates rushed forward and laid a slab of ribs onto a square of foil. She gave it a spritz from the spray bottle. Then she cried out in frustration.

“The foil is coming out of the box crooked. My ribs are wrapped crooked. Arghhh. Take it anyway. Go!”

The Great Lenexa Barbecue Battle is precisely what the name implies, a meat war, prosecuted last weekend by 178 teams with names such as Pig Bang Theory, Squeal of Approval and McClure’s PDT, or Pretty Damn Tasty.

Lenexa is an early, important skirmish in the greater competitive barbecue conflict, one of the first events in an annual summer-long drive to the world championship contests. The prize money, $2,000 to the grand champion, is important here, though often secondary to oven-mitt trophies and ribbons and far behind the ultimate goal of high scores that will bring invitations to the two most prestigious events.

Sometimes fun sneaks in among the heaps of slaughtered hogs and pseudo-scientific experiments such as the effectiveness of Rolling Rock beer as a palatable moisturizer for alligator meat. Fun is allowed among serious competitors, so long as it doesn’t get in the way.

“We’re going to Plan B,” McClure, 64, PDT’s head chef, called when a smoker began to lose heat in the crucial final minutes of her brisket work. “We got problems, we got storm clouds. Move ‘em to the other smoker. Let’s go.”

Slaves in the South began to develop the current notion of barbecuing when, having only the grisliest scraps of meat, they learned to slowly tenderize them over coal-filled pits. Smokehouses followed, then barrels and finally modern grills.

Somewhere along the line, apron-clad men with spatulas began expressing their masculinity by proclaiming their burgers superior to their neighbor’s. This led first to informal beer-fueled grill-offs and, in the late 1970s, the first large, organized contest.

Since then, competitive barbecuing has grown to include tens of thousands of chefs and grill-minders, usually in teams of six to 10, thousands of certified judges, hundreds of events, dozens of associations and a handful of newsletters such as the Kansas City Barbecue Society’s Bullsheet, the July issue of which contains a think piece titled “Meat Ethics, Politics and Economics.”

Although there are numerous barbecue championships, the two considered most prestigious by KCBS -- the largest sanctioning body -- are the American Royal, held in Kansas City, Mo., and the Jack Daniels World Championships, held in Lynchburg, Tenn. Both take place in the fall and offer as much as $10,000 to the grand champion. (The pork-only Memphis in May event also is a highlight.)

To compete for the world championships, a team must win either a sanctioned contest or a state championship. Lenexa, this year, was both.

As the sport, as some call it, has grown, enterprising welders have taken to building $20,000 custom smokers, complete with baffles, convection systems and delicate thermometers. Some full-kitchen mobile barbecue trailers go for $200,000.

Dedicated contestants such as McClure, a part-time caterer from Lenexa in her 22nd year of competition, spend years developing their spice rubs, deciding whether pecan or black-cherry wood smoke is best for pork shoulder, if a brush of lemon-lime Gatorade might lift their quail breast into the finals. Since judges’ palates differ from region to region, traveling contestants must alter their recipes and grilling process, typically going for heavier mesquite-smoke in Texas, vinegar-based sauces in the Carolinas, sweet tomatoes and often fruitwoods for Kansas City-style barbecue.

‘Fat Equals Flavor’

“The beauty of competitive barbecue is you take a crummy piece of meat and turn it into art,” said Carolyn Wells of the Kansas City Barbecue Society, wearing a necklace of dried, treated pork ribs.

Of course, Wells noted, serious competitors avoid truly crummy meat. They buy hogs specially fed for maximum fat content -- “fat equals flavor” being a culinary maxim. They buddy up to the best meat-cutters in town. One contestant at a recent competition spent hundreds of dollars on a brisket of Kobe beef, and still didn’t win.

“OK, chicken’s ready,” McClure, the 1999 Lenexa grand champion and holder of dozens of other awards, said as she slid a final sprig of homegrown parsley between the six golden legs.

The 22nd annual Great Lenexa Barbecue Battle began in earnest the night before at a park in the Kansas City suburb of 41,000, the sweet smells of barbecue luring thousands from across the city. The eve of the fight is party time for visitors, who sample the offerings and do their best to dance off the calories. For contestants, it is a time to dial in their smokers and gird themselves for a long night.

The first thing competitive cookers learn is that high heat makes for low scores. Most avoid grilling the meat directly above the flames, preferring smokers with a separate firebox. Gas grills are not only scoffed at but banned at most events.

Barbecuing a brisket properly in such a smoker takes 14 to 20 hours, a pork butt or shoulder 12 to 16 hours, with constant attention to heat and moisture. Some competitors monitor ambient humidity levels. Some baste their meat occasionally with apple juice or spray it with an apricot/water/oil/whatever solution; some wrap them intermittently in foil or special plastic.

Poultry was the first item on this recent day’s judging schedule, and by the time McClure had chosen the six best of 18 legs, PDT had been grilling for more than 20 hours.

McClure’s son Mike was the runner, and he headed swiftly but cautiously toward the judges’ tent. Entries must be delivered within a 10-minute span -- judges hate cold meat -- with a new category every half an hour. Once the judging begins, the contest moves to race speed and stays there for three hot hours, tempers and tension rising.

“The runner has to move fast and stay away from the crowd,” Mike, a 42-year-old auto parts manager, said during a brief break. “I move quick but steady, watching for holes, watching for obstacles.”

He’d delivered the chicken in a regulation white Styrofoam takeout container marked with a number, the chicken legs lying on a bed of leaf lettuce and garnished with the parsley -- the sum total of allowed garnishments. He handed the box to a judging supervisor, who then took it to a table of six judges.

Judges score each entry in three areas. They consider presentation, looking at the depth and uniformity of the all-important smoke ring, a dark band that penetrates meats of different densities to different levels. They rate texture and tenderness, and finally taste, a category weighted to carry the most points.

The Task of Tasting

Judges can drink only noncarbonated water and eat only soda crackers to cleanse their palates. By the end of the day, the average judge will have eaten two to three pounds of meat.

“The rookies start eating everything of everything; you can spot ‘em,” said veteran judge Wayne Kelpin, 61, who wears a straw cowboy hat covered with barbecue contest pins. “Then they throw up or quit. I go slow. I eat all of my favorite and sometimes all of my second-favorite. The rest are just bites.”

Some of the judges were clearly rookies this day. By the end, they were pallid and sweaty, nibbling at the final entries with their front teeth like children ordered to eat their rutabaga or lose their Nintendo rights.

The heavy-hitters of competitive barbecue, many of them retirees and professional or semiprofessional cooks, secure sponsors. The choice meats, modified cookers, specialty woods and other essentials are prohibitively costly for most.

PDT, like most teams a changing squad of family members and friends, got their meat for free, their beer for free, and some of their dozen tricked-out smokers at cut rates or gratis. In return, the sponsors get to hang banners, and occasionally see a direct payoff for their investment. After McClure won the 1999 battle on a smoker called The Good One, its small Burns, Kan.-based manufacturer enjoyed a notable spike in sales.

Twenty feet away, a two-family team of second-year competitors called “You Don’t Win Friends with Salad” -- a named borrowed from an episode of “The Simpsons” -- had gotten just two things free: beer and their own portable toilet.

Having placed 150th last year, the team was semi-serious about its grilling, if a bit hung over from the free suds, as they moisturized their brisket with a finely tuned spray that included water, vegetable oil, cayenne pepper and Guinness beer. Still, they were less interested in the giant purple flag that is the trophy of the Lenexa grand champion than having a fine summer time.

“We’re here to eat, cook and hang out with friends,” said Dan Coleman, 30, a librarian from Kansas City. “We’re in it for the fun. Some people are way serious.”

Back at camp PDT, at midafternoon in the full heat of meat battle, McClure said: “I’m focused when I cook, serious.”

“She’s serious,” teammate and family friend Jim Corwin, 56, said a few feet away in a hushed voice.

“Serious,” said McClure’s husband Ted, 66, a retired professor of neural science who, like Corwin, stokes the smokers, minds the temperature and generally handles the dirty work. “We’re the grunts, she’s the chef. You can’t have two chefs.”

“How we looking, how we looking?” Donna McClure called to no one in particular.

After poultry, Mike McClure rushed off with the team’s rib entry. They had smoked six whole racks and decided on the two best. Donna McClure had spread more brown sugar and honey on the chosen racks, some Parkay margarine, and then given them a wash with her ever-present spray bottle, before carefully cutting away six pieces. If one piece is not completely separated from another, one judge will not taste the entry and must automatically disqualify it.

After the ribs, McClure sent off her pork butt, then her brisket, flawless both, everyone agreed, a passerby even offering, “Wow, nice smoke rings.”

There were three more categories: whole animal, sausage and miscellaneous, the last bringing alligator, emu, skate, pheasant and other barbecue quirks to judges with already addled palates. These categories came with modest prize money and ribbons but did not count toward the grand championship. They were for fun, and McClure was here for battle. She did not enter.

At 5 p.m. the bedraggled barbecuers gathered to hear Lenexa Mayor Michael Boehm announce the results.

Down the list Boehm went, heralding the top 10 finishers in each category. Seventy times he called out team names as whoops and hollers rose from the crowd, now just a few hundred team members and judges. Not once did he say “PDT.”

A team consisting in part of professional chefs took first in the overall. The fun-focused “You Don’t Win Friends with Salad” came in 39th. PDT finished 71st. McClure and her team returned to their cooking site, packed, cleaned and loaded their trailer in silence.

McClure sat down, popped open a beer, and lamented the free-for-all nature of the Great Lenexa Barbecue Battle, the newbies and hacks who skewed the scores and made it impossible, she said, for the judges -- many of them once-a-year types -- to separate the fun-seekers from the pros.

“I never even heard of most of these teams,” she said. “Our ribs were good, our pork was outstanding. We’ve cooked in Kansas, Arkansas, Indiana, everywhere. We know what people like. I worked more than a week on this one, and phffft-- nothing.”